This Darkest Evening of the Year
by Petronius
Summary: Angel makes the ultimate sacrifice for Buffy with a spell that reaches beyond time itself. Part 1 in the Time Shadows series.


**"this darkest evening of the year"**  
by Petronius  
Spoilers - AU BtVS - nebulous future/past fic, AtS 5

Rating - Okay for everybody.

Disclaimer - the usual, I don't own any of them. Poetry selections are by Robert Frost "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" and prose quotes from Charles Dickens "A Christmas Carol."

Note on the text:  
This is based on a dream I had the night of the Winter Solstice. It is set roughly season 5/6 AtS and after Buffy has left for Europe. The second part is "Time Shadows."

The "concoction" had worked. Angel knew that as he pulled the single horse sleigh to a halt on the edge of the McMasters' birch forest. Flurries of snow settled on the naked white trunks and branches that pointed to the midnight sky like twitching bony fingers. A carpet of light fluffy white lay visible spreading away in the darkness beyond the light of the carriage lanterns, and Angel's sense of smell told him more was in the offing.

He never realized until his return to Ireland that he could predict the weather by the smell of the air. Snow particularly. There was a sharp steely scent in the wind that penetrated the lungs and told him snow was immanent, if not already on its way down from the pasty gray clouds to the ground.

Angel pulled the heavy wool blanket wrapped about his feet and legs in closer against the advancing cold. His body shivered for a moment and again he marveled, as he had off and on for close to three years, how Willow and Giles' "concoction" had succeeded in restoring him to mortality. Now, three years later, or was it two hundred and fifty years earlier, he couldn't tell any more, this time of year, the winter solstice was still the hardest.

His new family reveled in the holidays. His wife, Rebecca, whom he had married within six months of his return and who had already born him two children, waited patiently by the massive fireplace. This was Angel's world now. The one of slayers, demons and vampires was finally relegated to promises he had made and fading memories he held fiercely.

The transformation Willow had devised wasn't anything like a soul restoration spell or even a stripping away of the physical vampire reality. It involved nothing less than the alteration of the time line, the recreation of the human form at the moment shortly before it was harvested. In theory, the victim, retaining the memories of the progression of events, could then act to avoid the hideous fate awaiting it.

Angel's interest in the process had been piqued when Willow described her newly discovered combination of spells and potions that could render a vampire alive and in his own time once more. The memory sent a chill through his heavily wrapped frame in the sleigh. Moisture ran down his cheek from the melting snowflakes on his hot skin.

He remembered how he had harbored the desire to see Darla one more time. The feeling had been growing ever since Buffy had left for Rome. They had communicated briefly but the spark was missing. Heck, there wasn't even a little smoke. Buffy was truly different now and had moved on while Angel lingered. She claimed there was nothing more to say. He had tried to tell her what he could see, the premonitions that haunted him night and day. More than anything, he struggled to explain his certainties regarding her impending death. There was nothing specific but he knew nonetheless.

The Slayer would have none of it. Hadn't she weathered apocalypses ad nauseum. Buffy was finally getting her feet back under her in Rome. What could possibly go wrong? She had heeded his warnings before but now just didn't seem the time. Italy was warm, her Slayer's work training new Chosens filled her days. And as for her nights, well there were stories that Willow and Giles felt no need to discuss with Angel.

So Angel was receptive to Willow's discovery. Of course Giles was dead set against it. Something about altering the time line and changing the present and the future. Angel grinned against the biting cold as he remembered the Watcher's admonitions against "buggering up" the future. But that's actually what he wanted to do, alter the course of events, anything to keep Buffy from dying as his nightmares continually warned him.

The potion he put together, the "concoction" as he called it, from Willow's careful description, tasted horrific and the incantations were among the most complex he'd ever had to master. But in a moment Angel's vision blurred as the shapes and forms of his world slid by in a smear of color, and he awoke in the streets of Dublin amidst carousing and drunken men and women. His head spun from the raw gin and his stomach gnawed with hunger, something he had almost forgotten in two and a half centuries.

She had held him up and led him away. He gazed into her eyes. Darla's blond hair washed across his shoulders. Before she could move in towards his neck, he plunged the broken handle of the wooden spoon into her chest. The image of her lithe form exploding into dust sat frozen next to him in the sleigh amidst the darkness of the forest and the falling snow.

From that moment on, he knew the changes were beginning, spreading outwards, like ripples from a small stone cast into a vast endless pool of water. He was creating a new world, not destroying an old one as Giles had warned him. He hoped and prayed those ripples would spread out across time and the centuries to reach Buffy.

"I know men's deeds foreshadow certain ends, but if the deeds be departed from, surely the ends must change." Angel nodded his head in agreement with Scrooge's cry to the Spirit of Christmas Yet To Come. Every human being that now would not die horribly at his hands, every new child that would be born, every man and woman who would feel the loving embrace of their partner, all these that he had snuffed out, surely the ripples must spread.

Yes, it was a new world he was creating, not sending an old one to its grave as the nearsighted Watcher proclaimed. That's what he had done as a vampire, spent all his eternal energies destroying people and a world that never had a chance to be born. He would change that.

It was the promise he had made to himself and to Buffy when he left two hundred and fifty years in the future. Tonight, during the long darkness of the Winter Solstice, alone in the sleigh in a forest of snow, he was keeping that promise.

Angel's horse shifted restlessly, tossing its head as the sleigh bells rang in a nervous answer. The jangling quickly merged with the sweeping hush of the wind and new falling snow.

For a moment more, Angel gazed out into the "darkest evening of the year." It was beautiful, this vision of the future, beautiful and lonely. It was what he knew and loved, the cold air, the falling snow in the wind, the waving branches of the birch forest and the path into the unknown. He pulled his muffler up tighter around his neck, gripped the reins firmly and coaxed his nervous horse forward into a comfortable and reassuring trot.

"For I have promises to keep," he recited softly to the falling snow,  
"And miles to go before I sleep."

Rebecca, young Connor and little Elizabeth Ann were waiting for him by the fire.

"And miles to go before I sleep."

pax,  
Petronius  
12/21/04 


End file.
